Several users kept pointing out aspartame metabolizes into formaldehyde and that aspartame wasn't approved for 16 years by the FDA until Donald Rumsfeld, former president of the company that manufactures it (Searle) gave the FDA commissioner the boot and appointed a new one.

The wikidorks (aspartame shills?) who police the aspartame article and prevent people from editing it could only respond by ignoring the entire conflict of interest and insisting over and over that the users pointing this out were "paranoid" and "conspiracy theorists" and falling back on industry-funded studies (literally the private corporation that made it studying it) saying it's safe, and the FDA being ultimately trustworthy. They accused the users of "writing a blog" and "diffusing history" (????) and said that this isn't what the talk page is for.

They said that the talk page is only for "suggesting ways to improve the article (that they police)" (????????) When that didn't work they finally accused their interlocutors of being traditional sugar shills, at which point someone responded that both sugar and aspartame are bad for you, and that the USA allows high fructose corn syrup while other countries don't, because it has lax regulations. This is when the entire conversation was shut the fuck down.

TL;DR wiki nerds get to invoke "it's not a forum" rule to shut down people "diffusing history" while accusing their interlocutors of being "paranoid conspiracy theorists" and claiming that pointing out conflicts of interest in the FDA approval is wrong because... the FDA is the most reliable source.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Aspartame

  • KiaKaha [he/him]M
    ·
    2 years ago

    Oh hey, would you look at that, a recent study showing even low doses of aspartame cause cancer in rodents.

    The author even has his own Wikipedia page.

    Philip John Landrigan (born June 14, 1942), is an American epidemiologist and pediatrician and one of the world's leading advocates of children's health.[1][2]

    He was formerly the Director of the Children's Environmental Health Center and the Ethel Wise Professor and Chair of the Department of Preventive Medicine at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City.

    In 2018 he became the founding director of Boston College's Global Public Health Program and the Global Pollution Observatory within the Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society.[4]

    He seems like kind of a big deal.

    Odd that his research on aspartame isn’t on his Wikipedia page. :thinkin-lenin:

    • ZoomeristLeninist [they/them, she/her]
      ·
      2 years ago

      interesting article but the lowest dosage they tested would be equivalent to the average person drinking ~10 diet sodas/day. maybe the guy who drinks two big gulps a day is fucked, but i wanna know what aspartame does to people with more reasonable consumption habits.

      the authors definitely should have tested a wider variety of doses (2, 5, and 10 mg/kg).

      • Bnova [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        A wider variety of doses would have been cool, but adding two more treatments would ostensibly double their work. And after looking at the full paper it looks like the author basically inherited ~3,000 dead rats/mice that had undergone the treatments in the 90's.